How to Save a Life

• "Call of the Void," Ch 1 of Apocaloptimist
• Lily Takes Root

Alain Frechette

Mina slumped on the sofa, wanting a cigarette more than she had ever wanted one in her life. "What the hell did you need to talk about so bad?"

Reed, across from her, said nothing at first. He stared in a way that would make a less willful woman self-conscious. It only caused Mina to feel annoyed that he was wasting her time. She had better things to be doing or, if not, more appealing worse ones. She managed not to be annoyed with him, aside from the flighty women he dated in their two decades of friendship. They had almost all bugged her, usually having all the depth of a shot glass of vodka with none of the body.

Reed and she had drifted farther apart in the last seven years, but there was reliability in having been friends during seminal moments in both their lives. Whatever their friendship was now, they had cemented it before he went to college, and she didn't. Now, he was smug with an adult job and a wife who was a few steps up from most of his girlfriends. (His wife had at least regarded Mina as a person in her own right and not merely the receptacle of a well-earned reputation.) Yes, he was smug now, but he had been arrogant when they met and with far less of a reason. His smugness was an improvement, not that she cared either way. She assumed he didn't mean or want to be smug. It was merely his nature.

She had, to varying degrees, been a fuckup almost as long as she had been anything. She was proud of this, for the most part. It was easier to be popular screwing up one's life in high school. One's thirties provided a complete lack of oversight that made up for her family all but disowning her. She was born a fuckup, and she would die as one. Most people either didn't know their lot in life or pretended they didn't. Mina didn't harbor illusions about that.

"I wanted to talk," said Reed finally, adding, "We haven't talked in years."

"We've talked," she replied in reflexive defense, but he wasn't wrong. Liking statuses on social media, being snarky about the same articles, was not talking. She couldn't recall the last time they had a conversation of any substance. She didn't want to give him the truth of her being a fuckup. He knew the broad strokes. He didn't need the running tally of the evidence.

Having said it, though, she wasn't going to back down.

"We haven't," he said. "I miss you."

He meant it, and she wished that he didn't. "I'm right here, aren't I?"

"You are."

He kept looking at her in a way that gave her the creeps. She hated it when he was this sincere. She preferred him anxious. Defense mechanisms made him more entertaining to be around. She liked it when he defused any quiet moment he could with a joke. When he had visited her in rehab, it was always with jokes to undercut his panic until their visit was over. He had never looked her square in the eye like he did now and said that he missed her. He didn't need to. She missed him as well, missed him more because he had his perky little wife and the friends that adults make after college. She had him, the tenuous friendship of a couple of dealers, her therapist, and the dwindling family members who returned her calls. She slept with guys from time to time, but it wasn't intimate. She couldn't conjure the name of someone else who would have told her that they missed her and meant it.

None of this made her want to tolerate his sincerity. If anything, it pissed her off, like he had the luxury of putting himself out for rejection. She could have cursed him out, she thought, and it wouldn't have phased him. He had that psychological cushion. He could call one of his other friends, or even one of the friends they once mutually held, and relate how this hadn't worked out. That was smug.

"So, what did you want so badly?"

His lips pursed. What was she missing that he was behaving this way? Had she forgotten his birthday or something? She wasn't sure that she remembered when his birthday was.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

"Aside from you being weird, yeah."

"You feel okay?"

She paused. She didn't know why she wouldn't. Well, she did. A thirty-five-year-old fuckup trying to support an addiction caused the occasional issues. She was fine, considering. She had been much worse than this. She had detoxed from cocaine. That was torture. This was only a conversation with a man who was once the boy she dubbed her best friend-nothing in comparison.

Was that why she was here? Had she come here for herself, not him? Was that why he was acting this concerned? Had she asked him for money? She never did that if she could help it. It was begging, and it was more than likely not going to her rent or utilities (though it was the same pool of money, so could she say that he had given her $100 to go to the doctor rather than for stolen Percocet?). He always pretended not to realize, but his generosity had become slim in the last few years. She couldn't blame him. In her sober moments, she understood valuing the friendship enough not to consider him a mark.

"Listen, I'm feeling like I need some air. You mind? I could use a cigarette."

He considered it a moment. "You can smoke in here."

Mina reached into the pocket of her pants, incensed at their emptiness. "Did you take my fucking car keys? And cigarettes?"

"No," he says, though his emotion betrayed him.

"Where are my keys?" she demanded but noticed at once the gap in her recall. "Did I drive here?"

"You don't remember?" The way he says this was more curious, almost analytical.

"Do I look like I do? Did you drive me here?" The tension of this moment was too much. She was on the cusp of understanding something that she did not wish to know, but there was nothing she could do about that but press forward. The moment after understanding, after its stress, had to be easier. "Why don't I know how I got here?"

"I brought you here," he said, though she could not let herself take relief from this. "What's the last thing that you do remember?"

She was silent a moment, stretching toward a minute, her hand on her forehead, covering her eyes. Everything in her mind had a distance she had never felt and hoped not to feel again. She could barely put together the last month of her life. Finally, she was able to dig out the closest memory. She didn't want to hear his judgment, didn't want him to have this proof that she was a fuckup, but she said anyway, "I had shot up. Not a lot." She opened her eyes to him, leaning forward, his jaw tense. "I'm using heroin again, by the way. Clean needles every time, mother. I'm not looking to die of AIDS."

He didn't say anything, more pained than patient.

"I shot up and now I'm here. That doesn't make any sense." She rubbed the back of her hand over her face. Reed looked like he wanted her to stop her. "You say you brought me here. Did you drive? Did you take my keys?"

"What do you remember?" He prompted. "After shooting up, before asking me what the hell I wanted to talk about, what was going on?"

Her lips moved, repeating his questions. "I was here. I was pissed. You must have said something to provoke me." She gave a heavy sigh. "Shit, dude, if this is a goddamned attempt at an intervention--"

"I said some things. I wasn't sure if you heard them," Reed replied in a quiet voice. "I'm not sure you did."

"I heard you," she snapped, though she couldn't have backed it up if he pressed the issue. Her right hand tensed to a fist. She noticed for the first time that she wore a fleece glove, something she hated doing even in winter.

She started pulling it off. Reed's eyes went wide in horror, trying to stop her, which only made her do it faster.

Beneath, her skin was mottled leather, the flesh shrunk around her knuckles. She spied something hard and a dull white where some of her skin had split, a bone.

She flexed her fingers in front of her face. Reed tried to get her to accept the glove that had fallen to the floor. She had seen a lot in her life, but nothing filled her more with stunned dread than her hand now.

She always thought her hands were one of her best features. She wasn't sure about the rest of her body, but she always had her fingers moisturized, her nails polished. The muted red on them now seemed close to a beacon on top of a crumbling lighthouse.

"What happened to me?" she eventually found the will to ask. No answer would be good, but several would be worse.

"This isn't--" He stared agog a moment, unable to come up with the phrasing. "You don't want to have this conversation. I don't. That's not why we are here, and it isn't going to do you any good. I promise."

She made a fist to prove to herself that she could, but it served as good punctuation for a threat. "You don't get to dictate what does me any good when my hand looks like this."

"You're right. I don't." Still, he couldn't say it, and she hated that he knew the panic she must be feeling and couldn't spit it out. "You died," he finally admitted. "Overdosed," he added, though that was unnecessary. What else was it going to be with her? She tried not to leave the house, which prevented car accidents. (Her therapist had called it agoraphobia. She wasn't scared of open spaces. She didn't belong to them any longer. It might have been an interaction with something she had prescribed herself, but even the idea of walking around her development made her want to throw up.) Her diet was that of a teenager--too much delivery, too few vegetables--but she had at least another two decades before that could cause a serious health issue. She antagonized people on the internet for the fun of it, but she wasn't exactly giving out her address to potential murderers. If she died, it was going to be thanks to a drug. She would have been insulted if it hadn't. Though, realizing that her overdose would give people the idea that she was a lightweight, she felt insulted anyway.

She remembered the hit that had killed her, as much of it as she could. It wasn't more than she usually took, though an amount that would have euthanized someone who had not spent twenty years building up a tolerance. She had even had some of this batch a day before and thought it was fine. She'd had better. After that morning, she had woken up fine and went about her day. It was a nice day, she recalled, warmer than usual. She opened the porch window and listened to the birds, quietly satisfied that global warming might mean an early spring.

That evening, she had lain on the sofa to prepare. She cooked. She tied off. She injected. It was bliss, as heroin always is at first. She relished that feeling, that life was beautiful, that she was beautiful, that the singing of the birds was beautiful, and there would be an early spring because the world had taken another step toward ending.

Nothing different. No excuse that this was the hit that killed her. She had taken so many heavier drugs in far higher quantities. Why this time? She couldn't imagine that anyone, let alone Reed, would have a satisfying answer, so she didn't bother asking.

She looked him over, appraising him for the first time. She pointed her gnarled finger at his head and appreciated that he didn't flinch away. She would have. She would, truth told, have put a bullet in the head of anything that had a hand like hers, anything that was dead but holding a conversation. "You've got some gray hair."

"It's been a while," he answered, "since you died. A while."

The dread of this welled inside of her at once, her denial fighting a losing battle. "Why aren't I dead right now?"

"You still are," Reed said, breathing slowly. "Legally, you are. Biologically."

"Then how are we talking?" She waved her right hand at him. She understood that her left hand would look as decrepit but, as it still had a glove on, she could harbor the small delusion that it might not. She would not reveal it for her own composure.

"I brought you back." He nodded toward the design on the floor.

She looked at it, complicated geometry and the sort of symbols you'd see a wizard use in a video game. If she did not evidence that it had worked, she would have laughed in his face that he thought it could.

"So, what does that mean? Because this is not the hand of someone who is 'back.'" Reed must have put the gloves on her hands. Mina looked down at the rest of the clothes that she wore. Baggy jeans and a loose sweatshirt, slippers, none of which she had owned. If she wanted to dress a corpse while touching them the least amount possible, this would be a way to do it. What did she have on under this? The clothes in which she had been buried, but what would they have been? Her parents would have chosen. It was something hideous, covered in pastel flowers, a final way they could abuse her.

He let out a sigh. "I did what I could. The balance of life and death, you know. Resurrection is not something-- There is only so much one can do, you understand."

Her last small hope that this was the first day of the rest of her afterlife, one that she hadn't noticed, was building in her chest, withered. "I'm dead? Like, unrecoverably dead?"

"There isn't a cure for that. You don't-- you had an autopsy. Your organs don't connect. I mean, the organs that the doctors left. And you were embalmed. You've still decomposed a good amount." He sniffed, almost involuntary, and gagged. "I don't think you can notice how you smell, but it is about what you would expect."

"Open the window then," she said. "You aren't doing me any favors throwing up."

He got up and pushed the window as high as he could. It was a summer, or a late spring, night. The humidity of the day that had just passed rolled into the room, bathing them in its heaviness. She could hear the choir of insects and frogs. No birds. It was too late for them.

"Am I a zombie?" she asked.

"No, I don't think so. You are closer to a" -- half his mouth stretched into an almost-frown, discarding the easy answer and going for the kinder one -- "puppet your spirit is inhabiting."

"I'm a corpse puppet," she said. This was too heady a proposition for anger, and her denial tried to conquer this. With her dead hand, she touched the hidden hand, not wanting to make contact with this concrete proof otherwise. Her hand looked like something that ought to be in the Egyptology wing of a museum, a discard from a broken exhibit. The more she focused on it, the less it seemed she could feel it.

She tapped about her lips, feeling small holes where a mortician had threaded them shut, where Reed had slit them free. She blinked the irritation from the eyecaps that had held her eyelids closed. He had tried to hide what she was, but she allowed it only a few minutes. It almost seemed malicious that she couldn't have longer neglected what was happening.

Her face. She almost demanded that he get her a mirror, but that would be too much for her. She didn't know if she could handle the shock of that, of seeing what she had become, having been in the grave for-- how long? Years, yes. A decade?

How was she seeing now? How long could her eyes have lasted? She couldn't stand to know.

She only didn't notice how ruined she was because she did not have the presence of mind to take a complete inventory. Why would she expect that she was postmortem? She did not feel any pain, any actual discomfort. She wasn't comfortable, only not uncomfortable.

"Is this permanent?"

His frown became total now. "Nothing's permanent."

This was not the question she had asked, at least not the subtext of it. "Am I going to get better, Reed?"

"Not that I can tell," he said, then decided he ought to finish the thought. "You can't stay like this long. I've tried, with animals. It lasts a few hours. You spent around forty minutes waking up for want of a better term for it."

A few hours, and she was spending them being lectured. Sex, she knew, was off the table. She didn't want to know what the rest of her body looked like. Even a necrophiliac would refuse to help her out. Drugs, though. Something more than this conversation. "Why the fuck did you do this?"

"I wanted to talk to you." He looked so goddamned innocent and pathetic saying this, so like some lost puppy

She could not, at that, even feel the fury this deserved. She could mimic it, but no longer being alive dulled every sensation. She could think anger, but she could not feel it. The more she accepted that she had died, the further she drifted from feeling anything that belonged to mortality. "And you didn't think to bring my other friends?"

He shrugged one shoulder, himself calmer than she felt this situation deserved. "I thought about doing that, but I didn't want to have to explain this. I couldn't have a conversation with the animals. I wasn't sure you would return a sapient being. I didn't know that it would work on a person. Then it would just be your family having me arrested for desecrating your corpse." He paused. "It wouldn't have been your family, of course. Sorry. Your friends, though. I didn't know who I could have asked."

Because she didn't know who she would have asked either, but he wouldn't say that. With whatever years had elapsed, how many of the people she knew even now thought about her?

She looked at the patterns on the ground again. "What is this?"

"Necromancy. I've studied for years."

"For this?" she guessed. "This specifically? I'm not another experiment."

"No, your death is why I learned this."

She looked him over again. The crow's feet at the corners of his eyes were a testament to the length of his study, the rigor of it. Whatever this had taken from him could not be measured wholly by years.

"Why did you bother bringing me back if I couldn't stay?" she demanded. "Why couldn't you wait until you have perfected this?"

"What I've done is a sin against all that is natural," he said. "That's why you don't hear about this happening. This is the most perfect it can get."

"Why did you bother?" she repeated the core point more briefly. "You are wasting time."

"I wanted to know if I could have saved you."

She could not feel anger, but she thought it as hard as she could. "So, you did this; you ripped me from my grave to make yourself feel better? You didn't want to tell me anything profound? You didn't want to know if there is an afterlife?"

"You didn't know you were dead," he answered as though he had practiced the argument. Still, to say this drained him. "There is no afterlife. You were somewhere, I suppose, or I am just speaking to inspired sparks in your brain. I've made my peace with that. It's almost better because what I've done has to have earned me a place in Hell if it existed."

She rubbed her arm beneath the sweatshirt. The muscles were barely present. Nothing hurt because how vicious would that have been? Nothing felt like more than texture. She could not even feel the horror of this, as she knew she ought to have. She disgusted him, that was clear, but he didn't want to show it. She almost wished he could be honest enough with her to be revolted. If she was truthful, he should show her the same courtesy.

"I'm not going to say a word to make you feel better. At this point, if I knew there was an afterlife, I wouldn't tell you."

He nodded, seeing this as fair. "So, I couldn't have done anything to save you?"

It seemed rude of him to fixate on this point. She didn't want to make him feel better, but what else could she do right now? Would she sit and glare at him until she fell to pieces, her energy vacated? She considered for a moment biting him. She suspected that she was not the type of zombie where this would do more than give him a bacterial infection. "When would you have started to save me? When, exactly, would you have begun the crusade? You went to the extreme of destroying the barrier between life and death so we could have this talk, but what did you do for me when I was alive?"

"I was your friend," he said. "I wasn't the best one."

She jabbed a finger at him. He sat outside the circle on a wooden chair. If she crossed the circle's boundary, would that be the end of her? "Not going to make you feel better. You spent years trying to figure out how to make my corpse into a puppet, and you have. Where was that effort when I was alive?"

"I was scared I would lose you if I confronted you," he said. Not so smug now. "There isn't any reason to sugarcoat that. You didn't let people into your life who would let you down by trying to stop you, so I didn't try to stop you."

"You were scared of losing me?"

"Yes," he said. "But I've lost you now and forever. Look how well that plan worked."

"You could have been a better friend," she said but relented. "You wouldn't have been my friend if you had tried to harass me about drugs or much else that I was doing. You are right about that. I wouldn't have spoken to you again if you did."

"So, that wouldn't have helped."

"No," she said, feeling that he was not the only asshole in this room, "but that would have been less selfish than what you did. You could have at least felt self-righteous that you had tried to help me, and I died on you anyway."

"I was selfish, not confronting you. I wanted to stay around you," Reed said. "I thought I could do more good for you staying in your life than being another person you decided to hate because they called you out."

If they thought that they could have, how many people in her life would have done what Reed had done? How many people felt that they were sacrificing by letting her destroy herself? She might have tried to be deluded, but she knew self-destruction. Every time she tanked a relationship to try to make them prove they loved her enough to forgive her abuse and infidelity. Every time she pushed her tolerance to drugs and alcohol higher to prove she could, to prove to herself that no one would object if they didn't want her to banish them from her life. Every time she went home with some drunken stranger she had met on the internet, she was destroying herself a little. But she wouldn't pretend his tolerance of this was remotely noble. He didn't deserve that reprieve.

"You didn't make a sacrifice by keeping your mouth shut. You just became an accomplice."

"I know that now," he said. "I do. I wanted to hear you say it, I think."

She believed this. He had a hand in her death because he didn't try to have one in her life. That truth did not ease what he was going through. She did not see that as her priority or obligation.

"How much time do you figure I have left?" she asked.

"Maybe an hour," he said. "Do you have something you want to do?"

"I don't see the point of it. I won't feel it. I want to sit with you until it is over. I'd like it if you could pretend things are normal, that we were sitting around and bullshitting like in high school. You don't deserve that, and maybe neither do I, but you asked for my last request. No one else had the chance to give me one." Tears started to drip from his cheeks, but she wouldn't let it rest there. "Then I want you to promise you will burn my body so you can't try this again when you discover new regrets. I'm done with the earth. I had my chance, and I didn't use it like you wish I had. I can't change that. Even with what you did, you can't change it, or you would have. Burn my body and don't do this again."

He shook his head. "You hate fire."

"I hate what you did to me more. Promise."

"With you gone, I won't have a reason."

"That's a lie," she snapped, impressed that she could find the vehemence. "You talked yourself into this once. You'll find a reason. Someone in your life will die, and you will remember this is an option. You will think this will make the pain less. Don't. If you have something to say, have the balls to say it before you need to break reality to do it. Accept those consequences."

He made his promise and then was good enough not to make her talk about it any longer.

He caught her up on what had happened with their friends, treating it like any other gossip. It wasn't normal between them, but it hadn't been since their frivolous twenties. It was as close to a pretense of it as Reed could manage. She even allowed a few laughs when she could forget their status, her limitations.

"That's it," she said, her final words. Her spirit left form, which slumped and fell over without the gyroscope of animation in it.

He looked down at this corpse, withered to near a mummy, with an unreadable expression. Reed was not sad at this second passing, and he was not satisfied by the time he had stolen from death, but he was resolved that this was all he would ever get.